<body><div><figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=0aAn1s_1H1InkpE00" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=0aAn1s_1H1InkpE00" width="1448" height="1086" ></figure><p>The Nemo Volunteer Fire Department is raffling off a 20-year Pappy Van Winkle. The list also holds a complete Weller rainbow, all six bottles, and an Elijah Craig 21-year single barrel. The department posted the full list in the comments of its Facebook post, close to 60 bottles in all, and the lineup runs top shelf the whole way down.</p><p>Tickets are $20 apiece, or six for $100. You can buy as many as you want. Entries opened November 11 and close December 6 at midnight, and the drawing happens two days later.</p><p>Money from this one goes toward an addition on the Nemo Fire Hall.</p><h2>The town the sawmill left</h2><p>Nemo got started in 1877, down in a valley in the southeast corner of Lawrence County with limestone cliffs standing over it. Nobody has ever been able to explain the name. The Homestake Mining Company put a timber camp there in 1898, and the timber cut around Nemo became Case One, the first sale of federal forest timber in the country. A narrow gauge railroad reached town the same year and hauled mine timbers out until 1930.</p><p>By the late 1930s Homestake had built a bigger, more modern mill over in Spearfish, and most of Nemo followed the work. The 1900 census counted around 200 people in the township. Today it runs about 42 year-round residents.</p><p>What's left is worth the drive up Nemo Road, which is 25 minutes of creek bottom and canyon wall out of Rapid City. The mercantile has been standing since 1889 and doubles as the town museum, with rock collections, old photographs, and a player piano. Out at the guest ranch, the restaurant sits in a former Homestake sawmill office with a living pine tree coming up through the roof.</p><p>The department covers a lot of that timber and a lot of two-track with people who have day jobs.</p><h2>Last year bought a truck</h2><p>The department ran this same raffle in 2025 to pay for a Fire Command Vehicle. That one is bought and on order, and a rig like that gives whoever is running a scene a place to work from, with radios and maps out of the weather. Whatever comes in this year adds square footage to the hall, which means room for apparatus and room to train indoors.</p><h2>About that bottle list</h2><p>Pappy 20 is the one everybody recognizes. Retail on it hasn't been a real number in years, since the stores that get an allocation mostly hand it out through drawings you enter annually and lose annually.</p><p>Collectors use "rainbow" for the full run of Weller expressions because the labels come in different colors, and getting all six in one place usually takes a few seasons of hunting, trading, and knowing somebody. Elijah Craig 21 goes on allocation lists and comes off them the same afternoon.</p><p>A list like this comes out of private collections. The whiskey crowd in western South Dakota is small enough that most of these people know each other, and plenty of them have watched a volunteer department work a call.</p><h2>Two ways in</h2><p>Online, find the raffle post on the Nemo Volunteer Fire Department's Facebook page and comment with the number of tickets you want, then send Venmo to @Nemo-VolunteerFireDepartment, last four digits 8067. The department replies to your comment with a check mark once the payment lands, which is your receipt.</p><p>Paper tickets are cash only, at Nemo Mercantile and at the Windsor Block Bar on St. Joseph Street in downtown Rapid City.</p><h2>How the drawing works</h2><p>A random race sets the order of the bottle numbers. After that, names come out one at a time. The position your name lands in matches up with a bottle number from the race, and that's the bottle you take home. Entrants have no say in which one. A guy who bought a single ticket can land on the Pappy, and a buyer holding thirty can win six bottles without ever touching it.</p><p>You don't have to be there. The live drawing runs Tuesday, December 8 at 6 p.m. at the Windsor Block Bar, and names get called whether their owners are standing in the room or not.</p><h2>Getting your bottle</h2><p>Winners pick up in either Sioux Falls or Rapid City. Exact spots get announced closer to the date, and anybody whose name comes out has 72 hours to arrange a time with the department.</p><p>Most of the money that keeps a department like Nemo's running arrives $20 at a time, through raffles and feeds and whatever else the crew can organize between shifts. The bottle list is what changed, and it pulled in people from across the state who had never heard of the place.</p><p>Entries close December 6. The bottles don't ship, so if you're buying tickets from Tampa, think that part through first.</p></div></body>

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The Nemo Volunteer Fire Department is raffling off a 20-year Pappy Van Winkle. The list also holds a complete Weller rainbow, all six bottles, and an Elijah Craig 21-year single barrel. The department posted the full list in the comments of its Facebook post, close to 60 bottles in all, and the lineup runs top shelf the whole way down.

Whiskey Builds a Fire Hall in Nemo

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The Nemo Volunteer Fire Department is raffling off a 20-year Pappy Van Winkle. The list also holds a complete Weller rainbow, all six bottles, and an Elija

Whiskey Builds a Fire Hall in Nemo

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